Global Comment on one comedian’s two rape jokes, and that comedian’s response

Comedians used to complain about performing in any comedy club that put comment cards on the tables for audience members to fill out after the show.

How many comedians long for those days now, now that the Internet and social media allows every audience member at every stand-up comedy show every night to broadcast his or her complaints not just to a club owner, but to the entire world? And then have those complaints shared and spread through Facebook, Tumblr, and into new media and even the mainstream media? And you thought hecklers were problematic.

Two years ago, Tracy Morgan held a public apology for one fan’s Facebook rant. Last summer, an audience member at The Laugh Factory held Daniel Tosh to task after he responded to her and her friend’s heckling.

“I tried not to embarrass Sam Morril,” wrote Sady Doyle, before later acknowledging she was, “you know, planning to write an entire piece specifically for the fun of humiliating the guy in public.”

Make a joke implying rape to a crowd of 100 in a dark, intimate nightclub, receive a lengthy article reaching who knows how many people. A million eyes for an eye. That’s how the saying goes, right?

So what’s fair in this new era of Internet outrage when everyone’s allowed to think himself or herself a critic with the same chance at reaching a global audience?

Here is Sady Doyle’s critique of Sam Morril. Followed by Morril’s response.

I tried not to embarrass Sam Morril.

To understand how hard this was, for me, I should start at the beginning. Which was: On April 15, I went to a comedy show. The opener was one Sam Morril. And his opener, as per my notes, went as follows: “My ex-girlfriend never made me wear a condom. That’s huge. She was on the pill.” Pause. “Ambien.”

When Sam Morril tells a rape joke, he pauses for a moment, then says some variation on the phrase “that was a rape joke.” He invariably sounds both proud and delighted. I should know. I heard him do it several times.

And it went on. He saw a woman fighting with her boyfriend, and something bad happened to her, and she said it wasn’t funny, but it was. He bothered a girl at a bar, and her friend said that the girl wasn’t interested in him, so he eventually paid someone to punch the woman who had stopped him from hitting on her friend. (Sam Morril is apparently a big fan of stories about women getting physically hurt when they object to the concept of having sex with Sam Morril.) It wasn’t just the occasional rape joke, or the occasional self-congratulation for telling the rape joke, that made the set so exhausting. It was just the steady, relentless, predictable drone of a man whose only punchline was some variation on “I do not like women.” At one point, I flipped him off. Then I flipped him off again. Then my face started developing a nervous twitch. And then we hit the night’s highlight:

“Hey, I’m attracted to black women. Yeah, I had sex with one once.” (Once!) “It was kind of awkward, because the whole time I was fucking her, she kept using the N-word. Yeah, the whole time, she just kept yelling out, no!”

At that point, much like any of Sam Morril’s conscious ex-girlfriends, I just fastened my eyes to the ceiling and waited for him to finish amusing himself.

So I told my editor I was going to confront him. Something big, and rude, and embarrassing. I’d send him an e-mail – maybe I’d just quote a bunch of rape statistics, and ask him to rate how funny they were on a scale of 1 to 10 – and I’d wait to see if he responded.

I had a reason for being invested in his response. Last summer, the entire Internet had been set aflame by comedian Daniel Tosh essentially threatening a female audience member with rape for objecting to his rape jokes. She had a blog; she used the blog to relate what he’d said; Daniel Tosh, who had an entire show about the goddamn Internet, was apparently shocked and mortally wounded that someone in his audience had a blog.

Which would have been obnoxious enough on its own, without the stand-up comedians of the world rallying around Tosh. And yet, rally they did: Patton Oswalt referred to the woman as “some idiotic blogger,” and lamented that Tosh had been made to apologize to the woman he’d wished would be “raped by like two guys.” Dane Cook helpfully informed those who were offended by Tosh that “it’s best for everyone if you just kill yourself.” (After you get raped by the two guys, I guess. It’s a remarkably rough night Cook and Tosh had planned for that woman.) Even the normally reasonable and intelligent Louis C.K. got sucked into defending Tosh’s comments – although, thankfully, he didn’t go the route of Doug Stanhope, who hashtagged his Tweet about the controversy, simply, #FuckThatPig.

He was, yes, referring to the woman that Tosh had threatened. Because this is how it goes, between female comedy fans – especially feminists – and male stand-up comics. Let’s be entirely clear here: These are grown men who get paid money to stand in front of an audience and say, quite literally, whatever they want, as long as they think it’s funny. And yet when women talk back, especially if it’s not flattering, we’re “idiots,” pigs, better off raped, or better off dead. These guys grow up, go into entertainment, and then react to the presence of an audience as if it’s a form of armed robbery. But female comedy fans exist. We go to shows. In the age of social media, our microphones can be as big as any comic’s, or bigger. Why shouldn’t they hear what we have to say? More to the point: Why do they still act as if it’s avoidable?

Because they do. One year and approximately seventy thousand blog posts later, people were still hiring Sam Morril. Because, you know. What could possibly go wrong?

So, I wrote to my editor, I was going to do it differently. I was going to give him no possible chance to claim that he’d been ambushed, or stabbed in the back. I was going to find him. I was going to tell him exactly who I was – “My name’s Sady Doyle. I’m a feminist journalist and pop culture critic, and I attended your show on April 13,” is how I opened my first e-mail — and I was going to tell him that I planned to write about his show. I was going to do this whole thing as fairly as possible. While still, you know, planning to write an entire piece specifically for the fun of humiliating the guy in public.

He wrote back.

Lets do it, Sady! Shoot me the questions. Thanks for thinking of me.

Best, Sam

It was at this point that the story changed. He’d responded. In fact, he’d responded almost right away. There was a chance I could actually talk to the guy. And so I started to have doubts about my initial premise. A list of rape stats and an invitation to rate them on the scale of humor: I could do that. I could send that. I could print that. It would have been splashy, and it would have made my point, and – moreover – I was absolutely certain that he would be unable to respond to it. He would look like a coward. I would look like a hero.

But it would have been a lie. It would have been worse than that: It would have been shitty journalism. I could game the system, pre-determine the outcome, give Sam Morril something he absolutely couldn’t respond to without looking like an asshole, and absolutely couldn’t ignore without looking weak, and then reveal to my readers – as if it were a surprise – that I’d managed to make the guy look bad. I would have looked brave to the outside world, while knowing deep down that I’d risked absolutely nothing. In point of fact, I would have been no better than a stand-up comic bullying an audience member for not laughing at his jokes. To do this thing right – to do it fair – I had to come to the table with the presumption of good faith. I didn’t have to pitch the guy softballs. But I had to give Sam Morril an honest chance to write back.

So I sat down. And I wrote the nicest e-mail I could manage.

Hi Sam –

Thanks for responding so quickly! And I’m sorry that I didn’t do the same. The fact is, I have one main question, and it is: What’s with all the rape jokes?

I know the relationship between feminists and stand-up comics can be notably contentious on the rape joke issue. (Think Tosh.) And to be blunt, I sent you the e-mail because your set made me really mad. That’s probably what you were going for. But instead of firing shots at each other from the safety and comfort of our personal Twitters, maybe it’s worthwhile to talk about it. This conversation tends to get stuck in one repeating pattern: Feminists say rape jokes are offensive, comics say they have the right to offend people, and we just keep repeating the same lines from that point forward. So, even though I would expect you won’t like some of these questions, maybe this is an opportunity to open a dialogue.

One in five women reports being sexually assaulted. For women of color, that number is much higher; one study says that over 50% of young black women are sexually assaulted. (One of your jokes: “I’m attracted to black women. I had sex with one once. The whole time I was fucking her, she kept using the n-word. Yeah, the whole time, she was yelling NO!”) On your Twitter, you warned people that they shouldn’t attend one particular set of yours if they’d recently had a miscarriage or been raped. So, like: Are you comfortable excluding that big a chunk of the population from your set? I always wonder this, about comedians who tell a lot of rape jokes. You presumably know that it happens. Do you know that it happens this often? Is it a realistic possibility, in your mind, that not just one but several of the women in your audience have experienced it?

It’s not just that. An even higher percentage of the female population, 1 in 4, reports having been assaulted by a partner. 30% of all murdered women are murdered by their partners. To be blunt: You make jokes about hitting women. You also make quite a few jokes about killing them. One extended bit was about getting someone to hit a girl who didn’t want you bothering her friend, because you “couldn’t” yourself. On your Twitter (paraphrasing here): “I would never hit a woman. Or push one. Out of the way of a moving bus.” The basic punchline in your set was, the girl got hit, and you caused it. The punchline in your Tweet is that a woman gets killed. The punchline in your extended series of Tweets about Pistorius: Girl gets killed.

But in your Tweet about the Boston Marathon, you write that “this violence is infuriating.” What’s the difference between the violence perpetrated at the Boston Marathon and the violence that will affect about one-quarter of all women during their lifetimes, and account for no small number of deaths? That’s not a set-up for a joke. I just want to know. Why is only one of those infuriating?

Finally, Sam: The two rape jokes I counted in your set weren’t just about the concept of rape. They were jokes in which the punchline was that you raped a woman. (That didn’t happen with any of the other comics on stage, even though I remember at least one other joke about domestic violence, and the host did a long riff about rape.) And then a story in which the punchline was that you indirectly assaulted a woman. Given these numbers, what’s the benefit of presenting yourself to an audience — which is likely to contain some women, and some assault victims — as someone with an interest in raping and hitting women? Even as a joke? Where’s your pay-off there?

And I want to stress: I actually do want to hear what you have to say here. People keep having the same fight, and nothing changes on either side. Maybe this is a chance to actually have a conversation. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

S.

To date, we have received no response from Sam Morril.

Published May 4, 2013

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Sam Morril’s response via his Facebook page, today, May 6, 2013.

My response to Sady Doyle’s article about me:

First, let me say that I do not condone rape, and it is never my intention to write a joke that upsets people. I never write a joke thinking, “this’ll show ‘em.” I’m a comedian.

Making jokes about terrible things is part of what comics do and when you paraphrase jokes on very delicate topics, you’re stripping them of their meaning and irony, the things that makes them funny. In my N word joke you referred to, you decided to leave out the punchline, which is pretty important when you’re quoting a joke, especially about such a sensitive topic. The punchline is that the crowd thinks: “We thought he was going to say the N word, then thank God…It’s just a rape joke.” It’s a moment of relief, but really it’s much worse. It’s a commentary on political correctness, not an approval of rape. Your reaction compounds the irony. My joke on political correctness brings out the political correctness police. You know who finds that joke funny? My female manager, my ex-girlfriend (we’re still friends), and my mom, all feminists.

You mention the “reasonable” and “intelligent” Louis CK. Well, Louis has plenty of jokes about rape. Ever heard the one? “You should never rape a woman…Unless you want to have sex with her and she wont let you…Then what other choice do you have?”

Many female comics joke about rape as well. Sarah Silverman has one: “I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.” Do you understand that neither Louis nor Sarah approves of rape? Do find it necessary to send them the pages of rape statistics that you sent me?

Rape, fart, dick, murder, genocide, etc. jokes have been a part of comedy going back to 400 BC Greece. I’m jealous that Aristophanes got to live blogger-free, without people text messaging through his plays. You conveniently left out the sentences in your initial first email where you wrote, “you really stood out from the other comics.” You wanted to engage with me so you pretended to be a fan by complimenting me. Very tricky!

You completely misquoted a story I told to portray me as a misogynist or worse. There are lots of bad people out there who do evil things. I think your time would be better spent attacking them. Most of them have no sense of irony either. You clearly were not interested in having a conversation. For some reason, you chose me to ambush, and spun this article in a manipulative way.

Here’s a quote from your article: “Let’s be entirely clear here: These are grown men who get paid money to stand in front of an audience and say, quite literally, whatever they want, as long as they think it’s funny.” Yes, that’s what comedians do.

You say, “…And yet when women talk back, especially if it’s not flattering, we’re “idiots.” “ Sady, this is not a gender issue….Men who talk back during a performance are idiots too. Stand-up comedy is a performance, not a discourse. There are bouncers there whose sole purpose is to make sure our performance goes uninterrupted. Comedy is an art form. We get paid to say whatever we want, and I’ve earned that right to do so on good stages by putting in work year after year, and proving I can do it well. You have the right not to listen.

I got a Tweet from one of your readers 2 days ago saying, “someday I hope a man forcefully penetrates your asshole with their veiny cock. Rape jokes won’t be quite as funny after that.” Also, “or maybe your mother gets raped, or little sister. I don’t think you understand the culture you’re adding too.” Should I take that threat seriously? Do you condone this? Is that the kind of behavior you’re trying to motivate?

You quoted a Tweet of mine about the Boston Marathon saying, “This kind of violence in infuriating.” Yeah, it is. I think rape is awful too. Comics go to dark places to find jokes sometimes. That’s what we do. Woody Allen says, “Comedy is tragedy plus time.” I was horrified by the Boston Marathon and I still am, but I have jokes commenting on the subject now because I’m a comic and that’s my job. I say, “This Boston Marathon has made me very sad…It made me realize that my brother and I don’t do anything together anymore.” Do you think making a joke about this event means I approve of terrorism? (By the way, a couple of Boston comics have told me it’s a very good joke.)

You may hate my jokes. Well, then don’t listen to them. You have a right to your opinion. The bottom line is: I know more about comedy than you. I know more about funny than you do, and nothing was ever made funnier by political correctness.

I know a ton of funny people and I’ve never heard: “you know who we need to punch up this material? A blogger who doesn’t get irony.” We don’t disagree about rape. We don’t disagree about terrorism. We disagree about comedy. Thanks for your input.

About The Author

Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

2 Comments

I was wondering how Sam Morril would respond considering the challenge placed before him. I thought it was a well reasoned and (most importantly) funny rebuttal. The Brother/Boston Marathon joke is good. The feminist pop culture critic presented herself as best she could. The Comedian did the same.